Chapter 4 - THE NIGHT THE CHURCH BURNED AGAIN
We escaped the cold-storage vault through a drainage tunnel barely wide enough to crawl through. Meltwater soaked my coat sleeves, rust scraped my palms, and somewhere behind us men shouted over the alarm. The tunnel emptied beneath an abandoned loading platform two blocks north, where Elena’s car waited under a crust of snow.
No one fired. That frightened me more than bullets would have. Lorenzo did not want a war in the open. He wanted to know how much I knew, who stood with me, and where Luca would run next. Silence meant strategy.
I ordered Elena to take Beatrice to a safe apartment registered under one of her legal assistants. Luca refused to go with them. “If Lorenzo followed you to the warehouse, he’ll follow every Bellini car in the city.” He looked toward the river, jaw tight. “I know a place.”
The place was St. Gabriel’s. I told him it was compromised. He answered that compromised did not mean watched every minute, and that he had left something there we needed. Against every instinct I had, I agreed. A convoy would expose us, so we took separate routes and met six blocks away after dark.
Snow had stopped by then, leaving the streets under a hard blue cold. The broken church looked exactly as before, but the alley door hung open. Luca froze before I did. The smell reached us next—smoke, faint but unmistakable.
We entered with weapons drawn. The basement had been torn apart. Mattresses slashed. Medicine scattered. Food crushed under boots. The wooden table lay on its side, and black smoke curled from a trash bin where someone had set documents burning.
Luca crossed the room in three limping steps and kicked the bin over. “No.” He reached through ash with his bare hands until I pulled him back. “What was here?” He stared at the scorched papers. “Patrick’s notebook.”
Beatrice arrived behind Elena and stopped at the bottom of the stairs. When she saw the room, her face folded for one second before she forced it still. She picked up a framed photograph from the floor—her father standing beside a younger version of herself, both smiling in front of Lake Michigan—and brushed soot from the cracked glass.
Lorenzo had sent a message without leaving a body. He knew the church. He knew enough to search it. And he wanted us afraid of what he could reach. I called him from a prepaid phone.
He answered on the first ring. “You’ve been busy.” I looked at the burned room. “You broke into a church.” He laughed softly. “That sounds like something your father would have said, right before he ordered three men buried beneath a parking garage.”
“You’re admitting it?” “I’m admitting nothing. I’m asking why you’re suddenly interested in abandoned properties.” His tone remained casual, almost friendly. “Come home, Matteo. Whatever story someone is feeding you, we can handle it privately.”
Across the room, Luca watched me. I saw the boy who used to dare me to jump from boathouse roofs, and the man who had spent twelve years surviving because our family name made ordinary life impossible.
“I’m already home,” I said, and ended the call. We moved before dawn to a three-room apartment above a shuttered tailor shop in Bridgeport, one of the last properties still owned by an elderly family friend who hated Lorenzo. Elena brought food, clothes, and a laptop with no Bellini network access. For forty-eight hours, we disappeared from our own organization.
During those hours, Luca told me what survival had cost him. He had used six names, worked night shifts in warehouses, repaired furnaces, and spent two winters in a monastery near Dubuque where no one asked questions. Twice he had almost contacted me. Once he stood across the street from my mother’s old townhouse while I attended a Christmas dinner inside.
“Why didn’t you come in?” I asked. He gave a humorless smile. “Lorenzo opened the door for you.” Beatrice listened from the small kitchen while pretending not to. She had sacrificed nearly as much. She had left nursing school after Patrick’s death, moved whenever Luca moved, and learned how to stitch wounds, forge lease references, and live without photographs on social media. Her life had narrowed around keeping a man alive because her father’s last request had been simple: Do not let them erase the truth.
“You could have left him,” I said one night when Luca was asleep in the next room. She looked at me over a chipped coffee mug. “So could you.” The answer stayed with me. Elena reconstructed the missing part of Salvatore’s tape from a duplicate cassette found in a probate storage box. The full recording named no final mastermind, but it pointed to a set of accounts administered through Meridian House, a foundation registered to a retired federal judge named Harold Voss. Voss had served on an anti-corruption task force during the very years he was quietly receiving Bellini money.
When Elena showed us his photograph, Luca went rigid. “He was there.” “Where?” “The warehouse. The night I disappeared.” The conspiracy widened beyond family betrayal. Lorenzo had not merely stolen from Salvatore. He had protected an alliance powerful enough to bend courts and police records. My father had become part of it, then tried too late to crawl back out.
We needed evidence that could not be burned, hidden, or dismissed. Patrick’s notebook might have contained access information. Beatrice turned the cracked photograph over in her hands while we talked, and a thin strip of paper slid from behind the backing.
On it, Patrick had written a series of numbers and one sentence: IF THE CHURCH FALLS, GO WHERE BEATRICE LEARNED TO SWIM. She stared at the note. “Montrose Harbor.” Luca nodded slowly. “Your dad rented a storage locker near the marina.”
May you like
Before we could plan the trip, my phone buzzed with a message from a number I recognized as belonging to one of my captains, Marcus DeLuca. BOSS, LORENZO JUST CALLED A MEETING. HE SAYS YOU’RE UNWELL AND HE’S RUNNING THINGS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
A second message followed. HE’S ASKING WHO’S STILL LOYAL TO YOU. I read the words twice. My empire was splitting while I hid above a tailor shop with my dead brother, a maid, and a lawyer. Luca leaned against the window. “What now?” I looked at Beatrice, then Elena, then the city lights beyond the glass. “Now,” I said, “we stop defending my father’s empire and start destroying Lorenzo’s.”
